EU Citizens Depressed due to Brexit

Does your daddy or your mummy like Marmite?

This was a question put to me by fellow students, I’m sure it was innocently meant as a joke. If you don’t like marmite then it is apparently obvious that either you or your parents are not from Britain. However if you do like marmite then you must be from Britain. As it so happens, both of my parents were born and raised in different countries, my father from Germany and my mother from Estonia and they both love marmite and I, who was born in Oxford, hate marmite. However I do feel a certain threat underlying such a question in the unpleasant atmosphere of discussions around Brexit.

There are many European citizens living in the UK at the moment who feel threatened by some public conversation.

I would like to tell you about a few people I have met, many of whom work in senior positions or positions of public service in this country and who feel profoundly unwelcome in this country since the discussions around Brexit have released sentiments we all thought had long since been confined to history.

My father, for example, has lived in this country for over 40 years and nearly thirty of those years he has been an Anglican parish priest serving in Liverpool, Oxford and London. He has buried, married and baptised thousands of members of the general public during this time and has gained much re- spect. However, the other day a workman came into his church to repair the font and after noticing my fathers name, commented on his surname and said “Couldn’t they find an English priest then?”. My father feels that in the past one would have laughed off such a comment, but in the current climate it feels sinister and one is made to feel uncomfortable just because of a country they were born in.

One doctor I talked to is one of many European hard working doctors who came to work in the NHS because they were actively recruited from the European community. She loves working here because “In the English health system doctors can really be doctors and they don’t have to run small businesses as they do in my own country”. Now, she tells me many of her colleagues have gone into a deep depression about their status here in Britain and are considering returning to their countries of orogen and if this did really happen the NHS would soon collapse, considering there are thousands of European doctors and nurses working here.

However there is still hope that the great British sense of humour (along the lines of Little Britain and Fawlty Towers) and the many decades of diversity will help us keep Britain tolerant where love prevails. 

Helen Schunemann 

Sydenham High School